Gospel Prism

If you are like me, you do not like paying for software and are looking for good software. Well guess what? There is some great FREE software online called “Open Source” software. It’s free and legal. If you have more, please post in the comments section for people to use (and me too). Here are some you might want to consider downloading:

Mozlilla’s Firefox is the best browser out there. Definitely better and more secure than MS IE6. And now what Apple is being attacked more (hence Safari), just download Firefox and use it. Besides, you’ll see this blog better through Firefox

Again, Mozilla’s email client. I like it better than Outlook Express. Better Spam filters and I can’t stand spam.

I used to use CuteFTP until they started charging (ugh!). And for those of you who even know what an FTP client is, SmartFTP is better than CuteFTP any way. Their interface is very easy.

Thank you Media Coder. I was looking for anything free that transcoded video files from something (avi, divx, mpeg, xvid, etc.) to something (avi, divx, mpeg, xvid, etc.) and I found it in Media Coder. What an awesome free tool for anyone doing video editing and wanting it to play on other media players. It even transcodes VOB (DVD files). It’s also a good CD and DVD ripper.

Audacity is audaciously awesome! For anyone working with audio files and wanting to join, splice, or maniuplate those files, get this tool. It does a great job and has a wide variety of audio effects. It might not be for the music pro, but it definitely serves anyone at any level.

A pretty good media player, especially if you’re tired of Windows Media Player saying, “You must download such and such a codec to play this video,” and then send you all sorts of hoops to actually get the codec. Plays Quicktime, AVI, DIVX, OGG, and more.

Supposedly this is the best open source media player out there. One site says it plays everything under the sun. I’ll need to check it out. But you can’t go wrong, it’s free.

Like VLC, plays media.

If you are looking for an easy way to resize pictures, try Pixresizer. I used it to resize this pic to a thumbnail. It does a good job of keeping the resolution.

Handbrake is a DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. I have never personally used it.

Google has some great stuff out there and this is one of them. It’s an awesome photo manangement system with some basic and quick photo fix tools. Definitely worth having.

This is scary but some places say Gimp rivals Adobe Photoshop. I wouldn’t know because I’ve never used Gimp. I want to try though. But if you do not have Photoshop, try this and please tell me what you think. After all, how can you go wrong? It’s free.

Here’s what Paint.net’s website has as it’s first quote: “This program … has actually made me uninstall Photoshop.” Hmmm…again, I have never used this but it’s worth a try. This is what they say on their site: “Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.” Worth a try.

Tired of paying for MS Office? Openoffice.org (or OOo) supposedly reads all MS Office files and can convert back to MS Office. This is their description: “OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office, and the vendor-neutral OpenDocument standard from OASIS.” Here are its features.